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How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (2015)

95 points by lisper 5y ago

knuthsat 5y ago
Interesting, whenever I failed it was between 320kbps and uncompressed wav. I know that I did a blind test about 10 years ago and could distinguish between ~192kbps variable bitrate and lossless audio with my left ear, mostly influenced by percussion (left ear for some reason can hear 21kHz frequencies).
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Uncompressed CD audio is 1.4 Mbps. FLAC can do roughly 2:1 compression, so that's 700 kbps. It's not crazy that modern mp3s (encoders have gotten better over the years) sound good at half the size of something lossless. They're only removing subtle details at that point. You can see the same thing with high-quality JPEGs vs PNGs for photos. There's a decent size reduction, but to see the difference, I have to open the files in Photoshop, zoom in, and toggle which one is visible. If I compute the difference in Photoshop, it's usually only a few levels different, and never more than ~8. That's really hard to see. Sadly, they're not even using a modern codec like Vorbis or Opus. That said, while I doubt I can tell the difference between FLAC and high-quality Vorbis, once I learned to listen for distortions on the high end, it's a little hard to unhear. Same as looking for blocking artifacts in JPEGs or video.
  - teawrecks 5y ago
    FLAC is lossless, and given a random piece of audio it would be impossible to always encode into 700kbps something that is originally 1.4Mbps without loss of information. So your 2:1 samples claim doesn't sound accurate. Maybe file size, but not sample count.
    - colanderman 5y ago
      Yes, if you are encoding level-maximized white noise, FLAC cannot compress at that ratio, or likely at all. Music is not white noise. It does not maximize the channel capacity of the audio spectrum. As a rule of thumb, FLAC compresses most anything a human might call "music" in about a 2:1 file size ratio.
      - teawrecks 5y ago
        Right, so file size, not sample count. It's lossless.
- bydo 5y ago
  It's the sibilance that always gives it away for me. Even the 128kbps mp3 sounded fine for most of these, but when it fails, it really fails.
Answerawake 5y ago
Wow I kept picking the 128kbps MP3. Im using Sennheiser HD58X. I'm plugged into the headphone jack of my Desktop monitor which itself is getting audio via USB-C. Maybe the amp is bad in the monitor? Wonder if an external DAC would be any better.
- floren 5y ago
  That's the road you walk down to $10,000 audiophile RCA cables. A man sits on a weight bench, wondering if the equipment is defective because he can't seem to bench press 800 lb...
  - psy-q 5y ago
    I think in this case it's more like you've bought a truck but you put a lawnmower engine in it. It's a big step between esoterics and "please don't use the cheap shitty DAC that was integrated into your monitor to satisfy a feature checklist". The amp part will matter a lot the more impedance the cans have, and many of the better headphones are high(er)-impedance. Might as well spring for a headphone amp + DAC combo just to see how it sounds. It's not that expensive, FiiO has some for under 80 bucks, for example.
- simias 5y ago
  If you keep picking the 128kbps track it does mean that you can hear a difference, and maybe that you subjectively prefer the more compressed audio. That's why usually good audio tests use ABX where it's not about seeing if you can identify what is best, but rather if you can identify a difference at all. See for instance: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ EDIT: I actually just tried the test and... ended up doing the same thing you did. On the Neil Young track I could hear a definite difference in the high pitched violin-like background, but I ended up selecting the 128kbps track as the "highest quality", maybe because the compression made it sound smoother.
- jordache 5y ago
  high end consumer audio is largely snake oil
kurthr 5y ago
In addition to headphones, and hearing, there is also training. There are a number of audio artifacts in MP3s that are much more noticeable after training. However, many of them become much less discernable with variable compression rates and lower compression (>256kbps). It's possible to train on those artifacts, but I've always avoided it since I don't want the "projectionist effect" of making standard recordings less enjoyable. This is not the case for many audiophiles. They want to fix all the bugs!
- alexhjones 5y ago
  What is the projectionist effect out of curiosity?
  - benjohnson 5y ago
    As I understand it from the context - if you make yourself able to find flaws, you'll constantly find them, or think you have found them. If it's something you love, it may make it your enjoyment a bit less. For me, it's why I don't watch my wife pop zits in the bathroom. It's nice to not know about those flaws. :)
  - kurthr 5y ago
    Projectionists needed to learn to spot the little white blobs in the corner of films so that they could switch reels. Once trained, you can basically never miss it and it will annoy you every time you see it. Also, if you develop visual compression schemes (e.g. MPEG, H264, etc) you will basically always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in compressed video. That leaves you hating all DVDs, blueray, and digitally compressed video since looking at it becomes work.
    - samplatt 5y ago
      >you will basically always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in compressed video Netflix is AMAZINGLY low quality, even on the higher-quality tiers, and working with compressed video was one of the factors that ultimately led to me cancelling my subscription - I'd rather pay (or yarr) for an actual copy rather than something that's almost more compression-artifacts than actual video.
fullstop 5y ago
I got 4/6 with a pair of Takstar Pro 82's (nothing special) connected over HDMI from my monitor. I missed Neil Young and, surprisingly, the classical music, although I suppose that classical music is used extensively when testing codecs.
jkettu 5y ago
Curiously I picked 320kbps all but one occasion. Perhaps all those years of listening to MP3s have conditioned me to prefer the MP3s?
Bancakes 5y ago
How is this still a debate? Just keep a .wav backup and convert it to modern formats as they come. At this point I can only assume people listening to actual mp3's pirated the songs.
- fullstop 5y ago
  Or they use a streaming service, such as Spotify, etc.
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    Well high-quality (read: normal-quality) streams are a premium option. The more tech-enthusiastic might self-host a plex server or something similar.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  Do you even flac?
- marcod 5y ago
  You can assume, but it would be a pretty dumb assumption.
ipspam 5y ago
A worthless experiment. Audio is only as good as the weakest link. All phones will be insufficient for this test. All computer jacks and all monitor jacks will be insufficient. Most headphones will be insufficient. Only upon using a dedicated headphone amplifier with a moderately good pair of headphones should the answers become easy.
- slg 5y ago
  Isn't that kind of the point of this being posted? It shows that you don't really need lossless audio on your phone if you need special equipment and an otherwise silent room to tell the difference.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  I took the test several months ago with my nice DAC/amp headphones and got 5/6. Just tried again on my phone and got 0/6. And at the end it asks you what you were using. Seems to me like the experiment has value.
- cogman10 5y ago
  I often see claims like this from audiophiles yet the research with AB tests has generally found that no such differences actually exist. https://hometheaterreview.com/why-do-audiophiles-fear-abx-testing/ https://hometheaterreview.com/why-do-audiophiles-fear-abx-te...
  - silver_ears 5y ago
    That may be true for sources and amplifiers, but not for speakers/headphones. Go to any audio store with speaker rows and listen to a few. They are hugely different, and none of them are cheap quality. Which basically means that we are far from solving the accurate speaker problem.
    - randomfinn 5y ago
      There are also cases where the differences in amplifiers are obvious - for example some headphone/amplifier combinations have issues with low frequency response (related to impedance IIRC)
jccalhoun 5y ago
3/6 they all sounded exactly the same to me. I just guessed.
mynegation 5y ago
I picked 4 out of 6 and never picked 128kbps. I am pretty sure I can reliably weed out 128Kbps, but WAV vs 320Kbps is more or less luck. Jay-Z was the easiest as the chiptune sample is a rectangular wave and hence has a very high frequency component that actually makes sound less palatable, not more. "Hissiness" of strings helps on classical and Neil Young, but pop music (Katy Perry and Coldplay) with its flat wall of sound is much harder - I was listening for "z"s and "s"s and high hats. Acapella (Suzanne Vega) was the hardest for me and I think I just lucked out.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Same results. I'd love to see a similar experiment with newer codecs like Opus.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Suzanne Vega ought to be the hardest thing in the world to find an MP3 artifact in, since "Tom's Diner" was the primary litmus test used in the development of the psychoacoustical model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#The_%22Mother_of_the_MP3%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#The_%22Mother_of...
  - nr2x 5y ago
    I also found that really hard, and now I know why - that's amazing!
  - fogihujy 5y ago
    Great. I was feeling good about myself for managing to pick the uncompressed one, and now I keep wondering if I just got lucky. :D
  - dusted 5y ago
    I'd argue the opposite, "voice is the hardest to get right so we chose a vocal track" -> voice is hard to get right, so they got it least right.. For me, Tom's Diner was the easiest of the lot to pick out.
RootReducer 5y ago
I got 5/6 with a Schiit Magni/Modi stack and Beyerdynamic DT 770s. On the flip side of the coin, my wife regularly listens to music just out of her phone speaker and claims to not notice the difference. Everyone enjoys music in a different way, and I'm glad there are plenty of options!
smusamashah 5y ago
Doesn't it depend on decoder used by your browser? Will these sound different if downloaded and player with a music player software? Difference is too hard to notice in voice only audio example because it does not have that variation/detail in it anyway.
- silver_ears 5y ago
  Decoders are supposed to be bit for bit identical. It's the encoders which are different.
- atlgc 5y ago
  If you are referring to the Tom’s Diner clip, I actually preferred what the 320 mp3 did to the vocal reverb, its a little more stereo/wobbly than in the uncompressed.
impowski 5y ago
I got 6/6, you can select the right question based on how long it takes to start playing audio initially :)
- mynegation 5y ago
  You must be a security researcher specializing in side channel attacks.
- jagger27 5y ago
  Well now I can’t take this test and trust the results.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    Maybe you can run through all the samples to cache them in your browser. Reload the page to randomize then take the test.
tomaszs 5y ago
Music is engineered to sound good on every quality, up until the point when it is heard on low quality devices and adjusted so it is still perfect. It causes finding differences so difficult. It is not only that compression is so good, or that we don't hear the difference. It is also about the music being made in a way we shouldn't hear it. This test result is a tribute to sound engineers who make music good on every device.
Jiejeing 5y ago
This kind of test is really tricky because you are either trained to recognize the artifacts of MP3 compression, or you are not in which case you just "trust your gut". And if you are used to listen to compressed music (e.g. youtube), you will probably pick that. And that is not even taking into account that MP3 (despite being really old and not the most efficient at this point) is good at what it does, especially at 320k.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Usually what newer codecs buy you is the same quality for lower bitrates. AAC-HE, for example, would be pretty hard to pick out at 128K. Opus at 96K. Push either of those to 320K and I doubt anyone can really tell the difference. A similar thing happens with MPEG2. At a certain point, all the bits thrown at it make it indistinguishable from source. Where newer codec shine is when you start saying "what if we do this at 1000kbps" or "600kbps". https://opus-codec.org/examples/ https://opus-codec.org/examples/
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  This makes me wonder—these discussions usually assume that compression artifacts make audio sound worse, but is that always necessarily the case? Could they just as easily make it more pleasing?
  - rozab 5y ago
    I expect removal of very high and low frequencies could make some music sound subjectively better.
    - fuzzfactor 5y ago
      Sometimes it may be helpful to look at some fundamentals from a completely analog point of view before trying to make the most out of what digital has to offer. If so Chapter 14 Fidelity and Distortion in Radiotron (RDH4) can be a good place to start: https://ia801602.us.archive.org/18/items/bitsavers_rcaRadiotr1954_94958503/Radiotron_Designers_Handbook_1954.pdf https://ia801602.us.archive.org/18/items/bitsavers_rcaRadiot... >The values of total harmonic distortion to provide objectionable distortion are 2 % with a frequency range of 15000 c/s and 10.8% with a frequency range of 3750 c/s for music, and 3% and 12.8% respectively for speech, with a pentode. Even if almost nobody is using pentodes any more, you could do worse. The whole thing is 1400 pages, you can see what engineers were up to with their slide rules back then. Chapter 19 if you really want to know about decibels . . .
legitster 5y ago
I listen to a lot of music and got 1/6. I did a similar experiment to myself years ago with a MiniDisc player and found that 128kbps was indeed the sweet spot for myself. Especially when space mattered. While I am sure that more expensive equipment or years of dedicated study can help me discern the difference, I don't feel like my lack of refinement hampers my enjoyment of music in any way. If anything, I have no interest in training myself how to notice peas under mattresses.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I am glad there are people who master their medium; but I can't be a master of all media and the intricacies of their particular language, history and references -merely to consume them. Live and let live. I'd like less judgement for being like The Matrix character Cypher: “I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” Edit: clarity of point.
silver_ears 5y ago
4/6, never picked 128kbps. Used $50 Audio Technica ATH-M20X on $90 Behringer UMC202HD. Did audio production in the past (amateur level). Failed Coldplay, and Neil Young, the latter I argue has such poor source quality that it's hard to tell a difference. Tip: listen to the "air" of you want to spot the difference, that's the first stuff the compressors throw away. "Air" is the ambient sound of the room, the tail of the reverb, the stuff you hear when you don't hear anything if that makes sense.
echohack5 5y ago
I was able to distinguish the 128 kbps file every time (they sounded "muddy" to me), but the 320 / uncompressed wasn't distinguishable. In particular, the coldplay song is one I've listened to alot, and I was able to instantly tell the difference in the instrumentation. Listening on Apple Airpods Max, audio is getting piped through a virtual audio device via Loopback.
d--b 5y ago
Listening on my bluetooth Plantronics headphones in a fairly noisy environment, I can't tell them apart at all. That said, maybe the headphones compresses the wav as well...
- teilo 5y ago
  All bluetooth is compressed with a variety of algorithms. Some are better than others, but none are lossless (not even aptX-HD). I believe Apple is about to release a firmware update that they claim will allow some of their cans and buds to support ALAC, which is lossless, IF you have Bluetooth 5 devices, and only use it short range. My guess is that it will dynamically degrade down to AAC-256 if the devices are too far apart. Bluetooth 4 devices cannot support lossless simply because they do not have sufficient bandwidth.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I found a cheat. At least on my system, the WAV version takes ever-so-slightly longer to begin after you click play.
TheHideout 5y ago
When I was at Berklee [0] we had considerable ear frequency response training that would involve weekly hearing quizzes where they would boost/buck certain frequency bands of either pink noise or music and you had to pick out which band was made louder or softer. Additionally, we had a quiz where you had to listen to lossless vs mp3 at different bit rates and determine which was which. We also did neat things like trying to pick out what type of guitar and pickups someone was using in a recording simply by ear. 320 kbps mp3 vs lossless 16bit WAV (cd quality) is extremely difficult to hear the delta without training, but if you know what the source instruments are supposed to sound like, such as hats and you can focus on their frequency band, you can hear compression artifacts and comb filtering. This course really changed how I take in music and sounds in general. [0] https://online.berklee.edu/courses/critical-listening-1 https://online.berklee.edu/courses/critical-listening-1
- m463 5y ago
  So what are the characteristics of has that make them noticable? Would it high-freqency almost random noise? I think of how mpeg video cannot accurately portray looking at a rippling lake.. the sinusoidal motion does not have much in common with blocky mpeg.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Audio has its own equivalent. It's not noise, it's more of a gargly quality. You can hear it very clearly at more extreme compression settings. The overtone movements become disassociated and start splitting up into disconnected sine wave blocks. Transients also become softened. With MP3s this is obvious at the high end, while lows/mids sound passable. The compression algorithm has more frequency bins at the high end, so the damage is more obvious there. There's also a loss of low-level detail. Reverb tails lose definition, and the music loses front-to-back depth.
    - brador 5y ago
      Which headphones/speakers would you recommend/do you use?
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
The only one I got dead wrong was Coldplay. That also happened to be the furthest from my usual listening habits, I don't know if that had any effect. For the others I picked at random one of the two that sounded the most similar. In no instance could I tell 320Kbps and WAV apart. Could have been just luck that I didn't pick 128Kbps more than once. Hardware is Bose QC II on low noise cancellation, connected by wire to a MacBook Pro and ears, one of which can hear crickets, the other not.
dang 5y ago
Some past threads: How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758 - June 2015 (71 comments) How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743877 - June 2015 (1 comment) How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688095 - June 2015 (2 comments)
bena 5y ago
I used a pair of Powerbeats (Bluetooth earbuds) and picked either the 320 or the Uncompressed WAV (3/3) on all of them.
acchow 5y ago
The Neil Young track sounds muffled even in the uncompressed to me.
jdfellow 5y ago
Can't say I did well on the test. Actually made a decision on 2 of them and got the 128kbps on one and WAV on the Suzanne Vega (which must have been luck). The rest I just clicked something to read the snippets. And I've got HD598s and was listening through a UMC1820 interface. That said, I'll take lossless FLAC files for a download any day, simply because it's future-proof in a way compressed audio isn't. I'm quite happy to listen at 320kbps on Spotify most of the time, or transcode to 96kbps Opus any FLAC I have when I load it on my phone.
patrakov 5y ago
So, this is a combination of 6 tests, and each has 3 variants of the answer. That's definitely not enough to make useful statistical conclusions about the ability to detect bad 128kbps audio, simply because it is rare. Indeed, the probability of choosing all the best clips by chance is 0.13%, and the probability of never choosing the worst (also by chance) is 8.8%. Choosing almost all the best clips, with exactly one mistake, would have the probability of 1.6%, and choosing exactly one 128k mp3 has a 26% chance. Disclaimer: I have not actually performed the test.
karmakaze 5y ago
I could easily tell the difference between 128kbps and the other two. Telling the difference between the 320kbps and uncompressed was close to random at first. Once I know which is which I can pick each out. So the problem isn't being able to tell that there's a difference, but telling which is closer to the original. Each piece can have a clear tell, like the timbre of a particular note that's played in a busy soundscape. I used to have excellent hearing and now my high frequency hearing drops off at about 15kHz. I think because of this sometimes content that has already had some low-pass filtering may seem more natural where I can hear all that is being reproduced. I could tell the differences using an LG G8 QuadDAC on JVC HA-FXD80 earphones or the Surface Go speakers 3/4 volume at arms length. [Edit: I'd also been drinking tonight which raises my blood pressure and I can hear slight ringing in my ears triggered by bloodflow or viscosity change. I can try the test again tomorrow.] The best indicator for sound qualify is how long I enjoy actively listening to music. With a good source and sound production I can literally do nothing other than listen to the music for hours and not fidget with or read anything. Same with club systems. If it's not good I won't really have a good time for long. The Alpha Dynacord at Stereo in Montreal was amazing the time I heard it with 45 vinyls being played.
mafuyu 5y ago
I got 4/6, missing on the last two. Interestingly, I picked 128kbps for those, and they were more "pop"-y songs. Maybe I'm trained to like some more compression on pop songs? I was also listening on my work setup, which isn't ideal: Bose QC35s plugged into an O2 amp and D50 DAC. I'd like to think I would've gotten more right with some flatter headphones. The main things I noticed when comparing were: * low end was smoother on the bass * clarity of high end hits ("pss/tss" sounds) * some vague sense of better imaging, like the sound stage was better I didn't notice much difference in the midrange or vocals, but that might be because of the gigantic V-shape of my headphones.
pg_bot 5y ago
6 for 6 listening directly from laptop speakers. That being said I really had to listen intently to discern any difference between 320 kbps vs uncompressed. Everything sounds ever so slightly flat or muffled.
deathanatos 5y ago
That Coldplay song: the uncompressed one is clipped[1]. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/XSCw824 https://imgur.com/a/XSCw824 … [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- nr2x 5y ago
  That and the Katy Perry were bad choices, they were mixed to sound like shit. The breakdown in the Jay-Z track was really a good place to look for a difference.
- samplatt 5y ago
  Fuck, I was wondering about that. No wonder Coldplay are so inexplicably popular...
- throwaway222145 5y ago
  Despite those clipped sections, that's still surprisingly dynamic. Red Hot Chilli Peppers' Californication album on the other hand is a prime example of terribly mixed music all across.
  - deathanatos 5y ago
    I guess in a sense, clipping the waveform essentially allows you to keep dynamic range. To avoid the clipping (but to keep the gain on the quieter portions) normally one would have to compress it (more than it is / to the point where it would just graze the limits, but not clip). The cost, of course, is the the clip is horribly audible in the final waveform.
menesss 5y ago
Just to add to stats (which really, how useful is it with the variables of audio setup and subjective preference): 5/6 with Mobvoi TicPods using aptX HD. My wrong answer is the Jay-Z one and I picked 320kbps. I listened to the samples multiple times for each test. As I went through, I kind of used a strategy to skip to and compare the busiest parts of the songs for "muddiness". Still, it was always very tough to tell between 320kbps and WAV. Most of them were decided on a subjective "it just sounds slightly clearer and fuller". I think I had the easiest time with the vocals only track; can attribute that to being a vocally-focused listener. Side note on that last point: Only recently have I noticed how little I heard of drums in my music listening. Picked up edrums recently and realized how lost I was at drum beats "ideas". For melodies I feel like I have a large library of ideas to draw from. On the flipside, now I notice drums a lot more. Hopeful that others can relate to this too?
stordoff 5y ago
6/6 on poor laptop speakers, but based on a side-channel - the one that takes a second to load is the WAV. Actually listening, it's tough to make out 128kbps MP3 vs WAV on this setup - there's a slight difference, but only when listening closely and directly comparing the two samples. Generally I can usually (depending on the song) pick out 320kbps MP3 vs WAV on reasonable headphones (ATH-M50x), but I don't have a pair to hand to test these samples.
smilekzs 5y ago
4/6 For every case, I picked the one I feel subjectively the best. Interestingly, I still prefer the 128k version from the "Tom’s Diner" example, even after knowing the "correct answer". This is amusing because according to the descriptions, this song was chosen as the "benchmark" for the algorithm, which could have resulted in some overfitting ;)
- karmakaze 5y ago
  I've also noticed this with some DJ tracks that I play. I have some old ones that are 128kbps and I prefer a few of them over the higher bitrates. Gives it a lofi feel, as is the case.
gerardogaol 5y ago
Happily surprised I managed 5/6 on the sony xm1000m3 (man I hate their naming) over bluetooth. Didn't expect that! (my audiphile dad did 'train' me... made me listen to the highend stuff he's been building/crafting since I was little. I owe him disliking 128kbps on almost every setup ]: I'm fine with 320kbps for most things though)
8bitsrule 5y ago
Let me put it this way: I prefer Music-A so much more than Music-B, that I'd choose Music-A playing on an AM-radio over Music-B playing on an FM radio. Fidelity is indeed swell, but how important is it really? A lot of the music I like best, I first heard on a crappy recording or a shitty sound-system. There were A LOT of hit songs recorded before FM came along, and yet that 10k AM bandwidth (e.g. when the Beatles were big) didn't keep people from buying copies by the millions. Gasp! How can that be? How much of the time I'm actually listening to music I like do I actually care about the fidelity? If band A's crappy cover is available in FLAC, will I choose it because band B's brilliant cover is only 128K mp3? NO. This eternal argument has little to do with music. I still like 'Louie Louie' by the Kingsmen (a recording that cost $36), never mind how shitty the studio was. I'll still choose it over a FLAC from the studio master of "Never Gonna Give You Up". I can hear around the 'flawed' repro. Two kinds of 'purism' at work here. Pure genius beats pure fidelity.
- meowface 5y ago
  I'll take what I can get, basically. If I don't have access to good gear or good recording/compression quality, I'll use what's available. But if there's a song I like and I have the option of using good gear and lossless audio, I personally find it can optimize my enjoyment of the song.
- tkgally 5y ago
  That’s my position, too. I listen to a lot of jazz recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, sometimes with audible surface noise from digitized 78s [1], and the musicianship comes through just fine. I can read a novel or poem on a smartphone, in a paperback, on a fourth-generation photocopy, or in fine letterpress printing on 100% cotton paper. The reading experience might be a bit more comfortable in the last case, but the author’s words are the same in all. I like the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” too. I played it for my grandson yesterday. [1] https://archive.org/details/georgeblood https://archive.org/details/georgeblood
- sideshowb 5y ago
  You're right, but I think you're missing that it's sometimes genre dependent. The Beatles material was crafted to make it sound good over AM radio, and it does. I'm also a fan of loads of electronic music but as far as I'm concerned there's no point listening to the latter on a system that can't reproduce the bass. (Unless it's earlier material like the Prodigy which again I think was crafted to sound good on crappy blown car speakers - exception that proves the rule!)
atoav 5y ago
One thing to consider is that this for listening. However as soon as the audio needs to be manipulated e.g. use it in a film, sample it, EQ it heavily, adjust the dynamics DJ with it, low quality audio (especially mp3) gets exponentially more noticeable. In the end that compressed great song will still beat the uncompressed lame one, but how noticeable compression gets also depends on what you do with the material.
inpdx 5y ago
Oh, how well can I hear the difference in quality, from my laptop speakers? Geez, I'd have a better chance on my phone, and that would be no chance at all. I listen to Tidal through a USB DAC connected to a preamp -> amp -> respectable speakers. And I can definitely tell the difference. But no one can tell the difference on laptop speakers, the idea is nonsensical, or worse, spreading the idea there is no difference between uncompressed audio and highly compressed audio.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > But no one can tell the difference on laptop speakers, the idea is nonsensical, or worse, spreading the idea there is no difference between uncompressed audio and highly compressed audio. That is the point, isn't it? The absolute vast majority in of people listen to music on anything but gold-plated pre-warmed high-end systems. They listen to music on phones, on portable speakers, in headphones, while driving, cooking, taking care of kids, working... For any practical purpose there is no difference between uncompressed and compressed audio.
  - photojosh 5y ago
    I have to hold myself back from all the complaints about Apple Lossless not working on AirPods.
decker 5y ago
From what I recall about compression, the artifacts are at the high frequencies which also tend to get muted with age / sound exposure. Rather than play the game of determining if you can hear the difference, are there any diagnostics that can work backwards and determine the max bit-rate one could benefit from when listening?
a-dub 5y ago
one subtle point they missed: if your headphones are wireless (as it seems many are these days, as are car audio interfaces), there's a fair chance the audio is getting compressed again by a different lossy codec.
egypturnash 5y ago
So how many of these selections are wry jokes? The inclusion of the Neil Young got a smirk from me because of his past antics with promoting his “Pono” high-res music service. (2012-2017) The Jay-Z is there for similar reasons, explained in the opening: he was promoting his own high-res music service. (Still theoretically extant but he’s gone back to streaming on Spotify.) And the Suzanne Vega track is there because it was one of the three or four songs that was used as a benchmark for the development of the MP3 format; if there is any song that should sound good as a shitty low-res mp3, it is Tom’s Diner. But what about the Coldplay? And the Katy Perry? And the Mozart - and maybe this particular recording of Mozart? Are any of these entwined with the history of lossy audio compression, or attempts to sell lossless compression to a wider market than audiophiles?
deleted 5y ago
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maartenh 5y ago
I do experience differences on my HifiBerry + MFB (motional feedback) speakers between 320bps mp3 and flac. Mainly the crispness of e.g. percussion and voices is subjectively much, much better. This might of course be the IKEA effect, but I'm quite happy nevertheless with my flac collection.
kingosticks 5y ago
So despite a lot of comments here saying that can't tell the difference, there are still people out there determined to pay more money for Tidal's "HiFi" sound quality and with both Amazon and Spotify (Apple also?) also now coming out with "lossless" quality options. It may be considered snake oil by some but snake oil sells (not news).
jstummbillig 5y ago
I am sitting in a commercial studio today, working on a mix. I have been sitting here for most days over the past 8 years. This is my job. The equipment in front of me in the control room alone is worth around 90000 (SSL board, RME conversion, Neumann kh410s for monitoring and serious acoustic treatment) — nothing super crazy when it comes to studio setups but certainly in the 'above average' area of things, even in this profession and certainly when it comes to anything normies are gonna experience. My most expensive headphones (I own around 10) are Sennheisers for ~1.5k, powered by a Phonitor, which cost around the same. To toot my horn, I have been fairly successful at this. I work with chart pop/alt/indie musicians on a regular basis. I am actually in the rare position to have made a good living off of this. While working on a Mix I am intensely focused on listening, to the point where I will not notice when being talked to. I am listening to and passing judgement on over 100 individual sources of audio running at the same time. I will hear if one of the 16 background vocals tracks is slightly out of tune. I will hear if there's an unpleasant resonance on a guitar somewhere for a split second. Absolutely nobody, including the artist, will ever be as acoustically intimate with the whole thing as I am during this time (this is probably true for any notable mix engineer). Considering all this, the highly intensive and focused process, the considerable amount of money carefully spent (in contrast to audiophiles just throwing money at something because of what I would imagine are insecurities and boredom, I have to make a profit and thus spent my money carefully even) and my experience, I rank the difference between high quality cbr/vbr mp3 and lossless as so fucking negligible, that I will randomly chose either when making exports to compare my future working status to. To elaborate on what this means: I will make an export, place it in the project, continue working on it, and then at a later point solo (= switch to) to those exports to check if I am going in the right direction, if I improved on the critical parts, if something got lost on the way. To be absolutely clear on this: I would cost me an extra half second to make sure I always have a 24/96khz export of that mix as my reference instead of a maybe-i-dont-care mp3. I do not invest that half second. I don't know how to be any clearer than this. Do not confuse this with me not being able to probably spot the difference. It's just that it is about a skill as spotting a difference between two apparently white walls. I am sure with enough effort and attention to the task anyone would be able to make their brain tune in on the the differences. But why the fuck would anyone do that? There is no upside. No, it will not make you a better music listener or the music more enjoyable. If anything you are doing more focusing on the wrong things. Every now and then I stumble across this topic online and what used to be insecurity has turned into perplexion. I have no hope for or illusions about that the people who have trained their brains to search for mp3 artefacts (well done, I suppose) but maybe I can reassure some who seem to be on the fence on this topic: Do not dwell. This is a great way to waste time and money and get absolutely nothing of value in return. Aim for headphones you enjoy listening on. They are probably not that expensive. Make sure they have replacement parts available, specially for the ear pieces and cable.
dusted 5y ago
5 out of 6, and the wrong one was 320 kbit, but that one was very close between them.. between wav and 320 mp3, it's difficult enough that I can't put firm words on it.. the wav is "more" or "larger" or "fuller" without there being anything specific I can point at.
- asciimov 5y ago
  5 out of 6 as well using a cheap pair of Koss KSC75 with some late 30's ears. It was the Katie Perry Song that I missed. "larger and fuller" is a good way to describe it.

95 points by lisper 5y ago

Interesting, whenever I failed it was between 320kbps and uncompressed wav. I know that I did a blind test about 10 years ago and could distinguish between ~192kbps variable bitrate and lossless audio with my left ear, mostly influenced by percussion (left ear for some reason can hear 21kHz frequencies).

dehrmann 5y ago
Uncompressed CD audio is 1.4 Mbps. FLAC can do roughly 2:1 compression, so that's 700 kbps. It's not crazy that modern mp3s (encoders have gotten better over the years) sound good at half the size of something lossless. They're only removing subtle details at that point. You can see the same thing with high-quality JPEGs vs PNGs for photos. There's a decent size reduction, but to see the difference, I have to open the files in Photoshop, zoom in, and toggle which one is visible. If I compute the difference in Photoshop, it's usually only a few levels different, and never more than ~8. That's really hard to see. Sadly, they're not even using a modern codec like Vorbis or Opus. That said, while I doubt I can tell the difference between FLAC and high-quality Vorbis, once I learned to listen for distortions on the high end, it's a little hard to unhear. Same as looking for blocking artifacts in JPEGs or video.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  FLAC is lossless, and given a random piece of audio it would be impossible to always encode into 700kbps something that is originally 1.4Mbps without loss of information. So your 2:1 samples claim doesn't sound accurate. Maybe file size, but not sample count.
  - colanderman 5y ago
    Yes, if you are encoding level-maximized white noise, FLAC cannot compress at that ratio, or likely at all. Music is not white noise. It does not maximize the channel capacity of the audio spectrum. As a rule of thumb, FLAC compresses most anything a human might call "music" in about a 2:1 file size ratio.
    - teawrecks 5y ago
      Right, so file size, not sample count. It's lossless.
bydo 5y ago
It's the sibilance that always gives it away for me. Even the 128kbps mp3 sounded fine for most of these, but when it fails, it really fails.

Answerawake 5y ago

Wow I kept picking the 128kbps MP3. Im using Sennheiser HD58X. I'm plugged into the headphone jack of my Desktop monitor which itself is getting audio via USB-C. Maybe the amp is bad in the monitor? Wonder if an external DAC would be any better.

floren 5y ago
That's the road you walk down to $10,000 audiophile RCA cables. A man sits on a weight bench, wondering if the equipment is defective because he can't seem to bench press 800 lb...
- psy-q 5y ago
  I think in this case it's more like you've bought a truck but you put a lawnmower engine in it. It's a big step between esoterics and "please don't use the cheap shitty DAC that was integrated into your monitor to satisfy a feature checklist". The amp part will matter a lot the more impedance the cans have, and many of the better headphones are high(er)-impedance. Might as well spring for a headphone amp + DAC combo just to see how it sounds. It's not that expensive, FiiO has some for under 80 bucks, for example.
simias 5y ago
If you keep picking the 128kbps track it does mean that you can hear a difference, and maybe that you subjectively prefer the more compressed audio. That's why usually good audio tests use ABX where it's not about seeing if you can identify what is best, but rather if you can identify a difference at all. See for instance: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ EDIT: I actually just tried the test and... ended up doing the same thing you did. On the Neil Young track I could hear a definite difference in the high pitched violin-like background, but I ended up selecting the 128kbps track as the "highest quality", maybe because the compression made it sound smoother.
jordache 5y ago
high end consumer audio is largely snake oil

kurthr 5y ago

In addition to headphones, and hearing, there is also training. There are a number of audio artifacts in MP3s that are much more noticeable after training. However, many of them become much less discernable with variable compression rates and lower compression (>256kbps). It's possible to train on those artifacts, but I've always avoided it since I don't want the "projectionist effect" of making standard recordings less enjoyable. This is not the case for many audiophiles. They want to fix all the bugs!

alexhjones 5y ago
What is the projectionist effect out of curiosity?
- benjohnson 5y ago
  As I understand it from the context - if you make yourself able to find flaws, you'll constantly find them, or think you have found them. If it's something you love, it may make it your enjoyment a bit less. For me, it's why I don't watch my wife pop zits in the bathroom. It's nice to not know about those flaws. :)
- kurthr 5y ago
  Projectionists needed to learn to spot the little white blobs in the corner of films so that they could switch reels. Once trained, you can basically never miss it and it will annoy you every time you see it. Also, if you develop visual compression schemes (e.g. MPEG, H264, etc) you will basically always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in compressed video. That leaves you hating all DVDs, blueray, and digitally compressed video since looking at it becomes work.
  - samplatt 5y ago
    >you will basically always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in compressed video Netflix is AMAZINGLY low quality, even on the higher-quality tiers, and working with compressed video was one of the factors that ultimately led to me cancelling my subscription - I'd rather pay (or yarr) for an actual copy rather than something that's almost more compression-artifacts than actual video.

fullstop 5y ago

I got 4/6 with a pair of Takstar Pro 82's (nothing special) connected over HDMI from my monitor. I missed Neil Young and, surprisingly, the classical music, although I suppose that classical music is used extensively when testing codecs.

jkettu 5y ago

Curiously I picked 320kbps all but one occasion. Perhaps all those years of listening to MP3s have conditioned me to prefer the MP3s?

Bancakes 5y ago

How is this still a debate? Just keep a .wav backup and convert it to modern formats as they come. At this point I can only assume people listening to actual mp3's pirated the songs.

fullstop 5y ago
Or they use a streaming service, such as Spotify, etc.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  Well high-quality (read: normal-quality) streams are a premium option. The more tech-enthusiastic might self-host a plex server or something similar.
teawrecks 5y ago
Do you even flac?
marcod 5y ago
You can assume, but it would be a pretty dumb assumption.

ipspam 5y ago

A worthless experiment. Audio is only as good as the weakest link. All phones will be insufficient for this test. All computer jacks and all monitor jacks will be insufficient. Most headphones will be insufficient. Only upon using a dedicated headphone amplifier with a moderately good pair of headphones should the answers become easy.

slg 5y ago
Isn't that kind of the point of this being posted? It shows that you don't really need lossless audio on your phone if you need special equipment and an otherwise silent room to tell the difference.
teawrecks 5y ago
I took the test several months ago with my nice DAC/amp headphones and got 5/6. Just tried again on my phone and got 0/6. And at the end it asks you what you were using. Seems to me like the experiment has value.
cogman10 5y ago
I often see claims like this from audiophiles yet the research with AB tests has generally found that no such differences actually exist. https://hometheaterreview.com/why-do-audiophiles-fear-abx-testing/ https://hometheaterreview.com/why-do-audiophiles-fear-abx-te...
- silver_ears 5y ago
  That may be true for sources and amplifiers, but not for speakers/headphones. Go to any audio store with speaker rows and listen to a few. They are hugely different, and none of them are cheap quality. Which basically means that we are far from solving the accurate speaker problem.
  - randomfinn 5y ago
    There are also cases where the differences in amplifiers are obvious - for example some headphone/amplifier combinations have issues with low frequency response (related to impedance IIRC)

jccalhoun 5y ago

3/6 they all sounded exactly the same to me. I just guessed.

mynegation 5y ago

I picked 4 out of 6 and never picked 128kbps. I am pretty sure I can reliably weed out 128Kbps, but WAV vs 320Kbps is more or less luck. Jay-Z was the easiest as the chiptune sample is a rectangular wave and hence has a very high frequency component that actually makes sound less palatable, not more. "Hissiness" of strings helps on classical and Neil Young, but pop music (Katy Perry and Coldplay) with its flat wall of sound is much harder - I was listening for "z"s and "s"s and high hats. Acapella (Suzanne Vega) was the hardest for me and I think I just lucked out.

cogman10 5y ago
Same results. I'd love to see a similar experiment with newer codecs like Opus.
dsr_ 5y ago
Suzanne Vega ought to be the hardest thing in the world to find an MP3 artifact in, since "Tom's Diner" was the primary litmus test used in the development of the psychoacoustical model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#The_%22Mother_of_the_MP3%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#The_%22Mother_of...
- nr2x 5y ago
  I also found that really hard, and now I know why - that's amazing!
- fogihujy 5y ago
  Great. I was feeling good about myself for managing to pick the uncompressed one, and now I keep wondering if I just got lucky. :D
- dusted 5y ago
  I'd argue the opposite, "voice is the hardest to get right so we chose a vocal track" -> voice is hard to get right, so they got it least right.. For me, Tom's Diner was the easiest of the lot to pick out.

RootReducer 5y ago

I got 5/6 with a Schiit Magni/Modi stack and Beyerdynamic DT 770s. On the flip side of the coin, my wife regularly listens to music just out of her phone speaker and claims to not notice the difference. Everyone enjoys music in a different way, and I'm glad there are plenty of options!

smusamashah 5y ago

Doesn't it depend on decoder used by your browser? Will these sound different if downloaded and player with a music player software? Difference is too hard to notice in voice only audio example because it does not have that variation/detail in it anyway.

silver_ears 5y ago
Decoders are supposed to be bit for bit identical. It's the encoders which are different.
atlgc 5y ago
If you are referring to the Tom’s Diner clip, I actually preferred what the 320 mp3 did to the vocal reverb, its a little more stereo/wobbly than in the uncompressed.

impowski 5y ago

I got 6/6, you can select the right question based on how long it takes to start playing audio initially :)

mynegation 5y ago
You must be a security researcher specializing in side channel attacks.
jagger27 5y ago
Well now I can’t take this test and trust the results.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Maybe you can run through all the samples to cache them in your browser. Reload the page to randomize then take the test.

tomaszs 5y ago

Music is engineered to sound good on every quality, up until the point when it is heard on low quality devices and adjusted so it is still perfect. It causes finding differences so difficult. It is not only that compression is so good, or that we don't hear the difference. It is also about the music being made in a way we shouldn't hear it. This test result is a tribute to sound engineers who make music good on every device.

Jiejeing 5y ago

This kind of test is really tricky because you are either trained to recognize the artifacts of MP3 compression, or you are not in which case you just "trust your gut". And if you are used to listen to compressed music (e.g. youtube), you will probably pick that. And that is not even taking into account that MP3 (despite being really old and not the most efficient at this point) is good at what it does, especially at 320k.

cogman10 5y ago
Usually what newer codecs buy you is the same quality for lower bitrates. AAC-HE, for example, would be pretty hard to pick out at 128K. Opus at 96K. Push either of those to 320K and I doubt anyone can really tell the difference. A similar thing happens with MPEG2. At a certain point, all the bits thrown at it make it indistinguishable from source. Where newer codec shine is when you start saying "what if we do this at 1000kbps" or "600kbps". https://opus-codec.org/examples/ https://opus-codec.org/examples/
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
This makes me wonder—these discussions usually assume that compression artifacts make audio sound worse, but is that always necessarily the case? Could they just as easily make it more pleasing?
- rozab 5y ago
  I expect removal of very high and low frequencies could make some music sound subjectively better.
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Sometimes it may be helpful to look at some fundamentals from a completely analog point of view before trying to make the most out of what digital has to offer. If so Chapter 14 Fidelity and Distortion in Radiotron (RDH4) can be a good place to start: https://ia801602.us.archive.org/18/items/bitsavers_rcaRadiotr1954_94958503/Radiotron_Designers_Handbook_1954.pdf https://ia801602.us.archive.org/18/items/bitsavers_rcaRadiot... >The values of total harmonic distortion to provide objectionable distortion are 2 % with a frequency range of 15000 c/s and 10.8% with a frequency range of 3750 c/s for music, and 3% and 12.8% respectively for speech, with a pentode. Even if almost nobody is using pentodes any more, you could do worse. The whole thing is 1400 pages, you can see what engineers were up to with their slide rules back then. Chapter 19 if you really want to know about decibels . . .

legitster 5y ago

I listen to a lot of music and got 1/6. I did a similar experiment to myself years ago with a MiniDisc player and found that 128kbps was indeed the sweet spot for myself. Especially when space mattered. While I am sure that more expensive equipment or years of dedicated study can help me discern the difference, I don't feel like my lack of refinement hampers my enjoyment of music in any way. If anything, I have no interest in training myself how to notice peas under mattresses.

_carbyau_ 5y ago
I am glad there are people who master their medium; but I can't be a master of all media and the intricacies of their particular language, history and references -merely to consume them. Live and let live. I'd like less judgement for being like The Matrix character Cypher: “I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” Edit: clarity of point.

silver_ears 5y ago

4/6, never picked 128kbps. Used $50 Audio Technica ATH-M20X on $90 Behringer UMC202HD. Did audio production in the past (amateur level). Failed Coldplay, and Neil Young, the latter I argue has such poor source quality that it's hard to tell a difference. Tip: listen to the "air" of you want to spot the difference, that's the first stuff the compressors throw away. "Air" is the ambient sound of the room, the tail of the reverb, the stuff you hear when you don't hear anything if that makes sense.

echohack5 5y ago

I was able to distinguish the 128 kbps file every time (they sounded "muddy" to me), but the 320 / uncompressed wasn't distinguishable. In particular, the coldplay song is one I've listened to alot, and I was able to instantly tell the difference in the instrumentation. Listening on Apple Airpods Max, audio is getting piped through a virtual audio device via Loopback.

d--b 5y ago

Listening on my bluetooth Plantronics headphones in a fairly noisy environment, I can't tell them apart at all. That said, maybe the headphones compresses the wav as well...

teilo 5y ago
All bluetooth is compressed with a variety of algorithms. Some are better than others, but none are lossless (not even aptX-HD). I believe Apple is about to release a firmware update that they claim will allow some of their cans and buds to support ALAC, which is lossless, IF you have Bluetooth 5 devices, and only use it short range. My guess is that it will dynamically degrade down to AAC-256 if the devices are too far apart. Bluetooth 4 devices cannot support lossless simply because they do not have sufficient bandwidth.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I found a cheat. At least on my system, the WAV version takes ever-so-slightly longer to begin after you click play.

TheHideout 5y ago

When I was at Berklee [0] we had considerable ear frequency response training that would involve weekly hearing quizzes where they would boost/buck certain frequency bands of either pink noise or music and you had to pick out which band was made louder or softer. Additionally, we had a quiz where you had to listen to lossless vs mp3 at different bit rates and determine which was which. We also did neat things like trying to pick out what type of guitar and pickups someone was using in a recording simply by ear. 320 kbps mp3 vs lossless 16bit WAV (cd quality) is extremely difficult to hear the delta without training, but if you know what the source instruments are supposed to sound like, such as hats and you can focus on their frequency band, you can hear compression artifacts and comb filtering. This course really changed how I take in music and sounds in general. [0] https://online.berklee.edu/courses/critical-listening-1 https://online.berklee.edu/courses/critical-listening-1

m463 5y ago
So what are the characteristics of has that make them noticable? Would it high-freqency almost random noise? I think of how mpeg video cannot accurately portray looking at a rippling lake.. the sinusoidal motion does not have much in common with blocky mpeg.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Audio has its own equivalent. It's not noise, it's more of a gargly quality. You can hear it very clearly at more extreme compression settings. The overtone movements become disassociated and start splitting up into disconnected sine wave blocks. Transients also become softened. With MP3s this is obvious at the high end, while lows/mids sound passable. The compression algorithm has more frequency bins at the high end, so the damage is more obvious there. There's also a loss of low-level detail. Reverb tails lose definition, and the music loses front-to-back depth.
  - brador 5y ago
    Which headphones/speakers would you recommend/do you use?

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

The only one I got dead wrong was Coldplay. That also happened to be the furthest from my usual listening habits, I don't know if that had any effect. For the others I picked at random one of the two that sounded the most similar. In no instance could I tell 320Kbps and WAV apart. Could have been just luck that I didn't pick 128Kbps more than once. Hardware is Bose QC II on low noise cancellation, connected by wire to a MacBook Pro and ears, one of which can hear crickets, the other not.

dang 5y ago

Some past threads: How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758 - June 2015 (71 comments) How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743877 - June 2015 (1 comment) How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688095 - June 2015 (2 comments)

bena 5y ago

I used a pair of Powerbeats (Bluetooth earbuds) and picked either the 320 or the Uncompressed WAV (3/3) on all of them.

acchow 5y ago

The Neil Young track sounds muffled even in the uncompressed to me.

jdfellow 5y ago

Can't say I did well on the test. Actually made a decision on 2 of them and got the 128kbps on one and WAV on the Suzanne Vega (which must have been luck). The rest I just clicked something to read the snippets. And I've got HD598s and was listening through a UMC1820 interface. That said, I'll take lossless FLAC files for a download any day, simply because it's future-proof in a way compressed audio isn't. I'm quite happy to listen at 320kbps on Spotify most of the time, or transcode to 96kbps Opus any FLAC I have when I load it on my phone.

patrakov 5y ago

So, this is a combination of 6 tests, and each has 3 variants of the answer. That's definitely not enough to make useful statistical conclusions about the ability to detect bad 128kbps audio, simply because it is rare. Indeed, the probability of choosing all the best clips by chance is 0.13%, and the probability of never choosing the worst (also by chance) is 8.8%. Choosing almost all the best clips, with exactly one mistake, would have the probability of 1.6%, and choosing exactly one 128k mp3 has a 26% chance. Disclaimer: I have not actually performed the test.

karmakaze 5y ago

I could easily tell the difference between 128kbps and the other two. Telling the difference between the 320kbps and uncompressed was close to random at first. Once I know which is which I can pick each out. So the problem isn't being able to tell that there's a difference, but telling which is closer to the original. Each piece can have a clear tell, like the timbre of a particular note that's played in a busy soundscape. I used to have excellent hearing and now my high frequency hearing drops off at about 15kHz. I think because of this sometimes content that has already had some low-pass filtering may seem more natural where I can hear all that is being reproduced. I could tell the differences using an LG G8 QuadDAC on JVC HA-FXD80 earphones or the Surface Go speakers 3/4 volume at arms length. [Edit: I'd also been drinking tonight which raises my blood pressure and I can hear slight ringing in my ears triggered by bloodflow or viscosity change. I can try the test again tomorrow.] The best indicator for sound qualify is how long I enjoy actively listening to music. With a good source and sound production I can literally do nothing other than listen to the music for hours and not fidget with or read anything. Same with club systems. If it's not good I won't really have a good time for long. The Alpha Dynacord at Stereo in Montreal was amazing the time I heard it with 45 vinyls being played.

mafuyu 5y ago

I got 4/6, missing on the last two. Interestingly, I picked 128kbps for those, and they were more "pop"-y songs. Maybe I'm trained to like some more compression on pop songs? I was also listening on my work setup, which isn't ideal: Bose QC35s plugged into an O2 amp and D50 DAC. I'd like to think I would've gotten more right with some flatter headphones. The main things I noticed when comparing were: * low end was smoother on the bass * clarity of high end hits ("pss/tss" sounds) * some vague sense of better imaging, like the sound stage was better I didn't notice much difference in the midrange or vocals, but that might be because of the gigantic V-shape of my headphones.

pg_bot 5y ago

6 for 6 listening directly from laptop speakers. That being said I really had to listen intently to discern any difference between 320 kbps vs uncompressed. Everything sounds ever so slightly flat or muffled.

deathanatos 5y ago

That Coldplay song: the uncompressed one is clipped[1]. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/XSCw824 https://imgur.com/a/XSCw824 … [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

nr2x 5y ago
That and the Katy Perry were bad choices, they were mixed to sound like shit. The breakdown in the Jay-Z track was really a good place to look for a difference.
samplatt 5y ago
Fuck, I was wondering about that. No wonder Coldplay are so inexplicably popular...
throwaway222145 5y ago
Despite those clipped sections, that's still surprisingly dynamic. Red Hot Chilli Peppers' Californication album on the other hand is a prime example of terribly mixed music all across.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  I guess in a sense, clipping the waveform essentially allows you to keep dynamic range. To avoid the clipping (but to keep the gain on the quieter portions) normally one would have to compress it (more than it is / to the point where it would just graze the limits, but not clip). The cost, of course, is the the clip is horribly audible in the final waveform.

menesss 5y ago

Just to add to stats (which really, how useful is it with the variables of audio setup and subjective preference): 5/6 with Mobvoi TicPods using aptX HD. My wrong answer is the Jay-Z one and I picked 320kbps. I listened to the samples multiple times for each test. As I went through, I kind of used a strategy to skip to and compare the busiest parts of the songs for "muddiness". Still, it was always very tough to tell between 320kbps and WAV. Most of them were decided on a subjective "it just sounds slightly clearer and fuller". I think I had the easiest time with the vocals only track; can attribute that to being a vocally-focused listener. Side note on that last point: Only recently have I noticed how little I heard of drums in my music listening. Picked up edrums recently and realized how lost I was at drum beats "ideas". For melodies I feel like I have a large library of ideas to draw from. On the flipside, now I notice drums a lot more. Hopeful that others can relate to this too?

stordoff 5y ago

6/6 on poor laptop speakers, but based on a side-channel - the one that takes a second to load is the WAV. Actually listening, it's tough to make out 128kbps MP3 vs WAV on this setup - there's a slight difference, but only when listening closely and directly comparing the two samples. Generally I can usually (depending on the song) pick out 320kbps MP3 vs WAV on reasonable headphones (ATH-M50x), but I don't have a pair to hand to test these samples.

smilekzs 5y ago

4/6 For every case, I picked the one I feel subjectively the best. Interestingly, I still prefer the 128k version from the "Tom’s Diner" example, even after knowing the "correct answer". This is amusing because according to the descriptions, this song was chosen as the "benchmark" for the algorithm, which could have resulted in some overfitting ;)

karmakaze 5y ago
I've also noticed this with some DJ tracks that I play. I have some old ones that are 128kbps and I prefer a few of them over the higher bitrates. Gives it a lofi feel, as is the case.

gerardogaol 5y ago

Happily surprised I managed 5/6 on the sony xm1000m3 (man I hate their naming) over bluetooth. Didn't expect that! (my audiphile dad did 'train' me... made me listen to the highend stuff he's been building/crafting since I was little. I owe him disliking 128kbps on almost every setup ]: I'm fine with 320kbps for most things though)

8bitsrule 5y ago

Let me put it this way: I prefer Music-A so much more than Music-B, that I'd choose Music-A playing on an AM-radio over Music-B playing on an FM radio. Fidelity is indeed swell, but how important is it really? A lot of the music I like best, I first heard on a crappy recording or a shitty sound-system. There were A LOT of hit songs recorded before FM came along, and yet that 10k AM bandwidth (e.g. when the Beatles were big) didn't keep people from buying copies by the millions. Gasp! How can that be? How much of the time I'm actually listening to music I like do I actually care about the fidelity? If band A's crappy cover is available in FLAC, will I choose it because band B's brilliant cover is only 128K mp3? NO. This eternal argument has little to do with music. I still like 'Louie Louie' by the Kingsmen (a recording that cost $36), never mind how shitty the studio was. I'll still choose it over a FLAC from the studio master of "Never Gonna Give You Up". I can hear around the 'flawed' repro. Two kinds of 'purism' at work here. Pure genius beats pure fidelity.

meowface 5y ago
I'll take what I can get, basically. If I don't have access to good gear or good recording/compression quality, I'll use what's available. But if there's a song I like and I have the option of using good gear and lossless audio, I personally find it can optimize my enjoyment of the song.
tkgally 5y ago
That’s my position, too. I listen to a lot of jazz recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, sometimes with audible surface noise from digitized 78s [1], and the musicianship comes through just fine. I can read a novel or poem on a smartphone, in a paperback, on a fourth-generation photocopy, or in fine letterpress printing on 100% cotton paper. The reading experience might be a bit more comfortable in the last case, but the author’s words are the same in all. I like the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” too. I played it for my grandson yesterday. [1] https://archive.org/details/georgeblood https://archive.org/details/georgeblood
sideshowb 5y ago
You're right, but I think you're missing that it's sometimes genre dependent. The Beatles material was crafted to make it sound good over AM radio, and it does. I'm also a fan of loads of electronic music but as far as I'm concerned there's no point listening to the latter on a system that can't reproduce the bass. (Unless it's earlier material like the Prodigy which again I think was crafted to sound good on crappy blown car speakers - exception that proves the rule!)

atoav 5y ago

One thing to consider is that this for listening. However as soon as the audio needs to be manipulated e.g. use it in a film, sample it, EQ it heavily, adjust the dynamics DJ with it, low quality audio (especially mp3) gets exponentially more noticeable. In the end that compressed great song will still beat the uncompressed lame one, but how noticeable compression gets also depends on what you do with the material.

inpdx 5y ago

Oh, how well can I hear the difference in quality, from my laptop speakers? Geez, I'd have a better chance on my phone, and that would be no chance at all. I listen to Tidal through a USB DAC connected to a preamp -> amp -> respectable speakers. And I can definitely tell the difference. But no one can tell the difference on laptop speakers, the idea is nonsensical, or worse, spreading the idea there is no difference between uncompressed audio and highly compressed audio.

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dmitriid 5y ago
> But no one can tell the difference on laptop speakers, the idea is nonsensical, or worse, spreading the idea there is no difference between uncompressed audio and highly compressed audio. That is the point, isn't it? The absolute vast majority in of people listen to music on anything but gold-plated pre-warmed high-end systems. They listen to music on phones, on portable speakers, in headphones, while driving, cooking, taking care of kids, working... For any practical purpose there is no difference between uncompressed and compressed audio.
- photojosh 5y ago
  I have to hold myself back from all the complaints about Apple Lossless not working on AirPods.

decker 5y ago

From what I recall about compression, the artifacts are at the high frequencies which also tend to get muted with age / sound exposure. Rather than play the game of determining if you can hear the difference, are there any diagnostics that can work backwards and determine the max bit-rate one could benefit from when listening?

a-dub 5y ago

one subtle point they missed: if your headphones are wireless (as it seems many are these days, as are car audio interfaces), there's a fair chance the audio is getting compressed again by a different lossy codec.

egypturnash 5y ago

So how many of these selections are wry jokes? The inclusion of the Neil Young got a smirk from me because of his past antics with promoting his “Pono” high-res music service. (2012-2017) The Jay-Z is there for similar reasons, explained in the opening: he was promoting his own high-res music service. (Still theoretically extant but he’s gone back to streaming on Spotify.) And the Suzanne Vega track is there because it was one of the three or four songs that was used as a benchmark for the development of the MP3 format; if there is any song that should sound good as a shitty low-res mp3, it is Tom’s Diner. But what about the Coldplay? And the Katy Perry? And the Mozart - and maybe this particular recording of Mozart? Are any of these entwined with the history of lossy audio compression, or attempts to sell lossless compression to a wider market than audiophiles?

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maartenh 5y ago

I do experience differences on my HifiBerry + MFB (motional feedback) speakers between 320bps mp3 and flac. Mainly the crispness of e.g. percussion and voices is subjectively much, much better. This might of course be the IKEA effect, but I'm quite happy nevertheless with my flac collection.

kingosticks 5y ago

So despite a lot of comments here saying that can't tell the difference, there are still people out there determined to pay more money for Tidal's "HiFi" sound quality and with both Amazon and Spotify (Apple also?) also now coming out with "lossless" quality options. It may be considered snake oil by some but snake oil sells (not news).

jstummbillig 5y ago

I am sitting in a commercial studio today, working on a mix. I have been sitting here for most days over the past 8 years. This is my job. The equipment in front of me in the control room alone is worth around 90000 (SSL board, RME conversion, Neumann kh410s for monitoring and serious acoustic treatment) — nothing super crazy when it comes to studio setups but certainly in the 'above average' area of things, even in this profession and certainly when it comes to anything normies are gonna experience. My most expensive headphones (I own around 10) are Sennheisers for ~1.5k, powered by a Phonitor, which cost around the same. To toot my horn, I have been fairly successful at this. I work with chart pop/alt/indie musicians on a regular basis. I am actually in the rare position to have made a good living off of this. While working on a Mix I am intensely focused on listening, to the point where I will not notice when being talked to. I am listening to and passing judgement on over 100 individual sources of audio running at the same time. I will hear if one of the 16 background vocals tracks is slightly out of tune. I will hear if there's an unpleasant resonance on a guitar somewhere for a split second. Absolutely nobody, including the artist, will ever be as acoustically intimate with the whole thing as I am during this time (this is probably true for any notable mix engineer). Considering all this, the highly intensive and focused process, the considerable amount of money carefully spent (in contrast to audiophiles just throwing money at something because of what I would imagine are insecurities and boredom, I have to make a profit and thus spent my money carefully even) and my experience, I rank the difference between high quality cbr/vbr mp3 and lossless as so fucking negligible, that I will randomly chose either when making exports to compare my future working status to. To elaborate on what this means: I will make an export, place it in the project, continue working on it, and then at a later point solo (= switch to) to those exports to check if I am going in the right direction, if I improved on the critical parts, if something got lost on the way. To be absolutely clear on this: I would cost me an extra half second to make sure I always have a 24/96khz export of that mix as my reference instead of a maybe-i-dont-care mp3. I do not invest that half second. I don't know how to be any clearer than this. Do not confuse this with me not being able to probably spot the difference. It's just that it is about a skill as spotting a difference between two apparently white walls. I am sure with enough effort and attention to the task anyone would be able to make their brain tune in on the the differences. But why the fuck would anyone do that? There is no upside. No, it will not make you a better music listener or the music more enjoyable. If anything you are doing more focusing on the wrong things. Every now and then I stumble across this topic online and what used to be insecurity has turned into perplexion. I have no hope for or illusions about that the people who have trained their brains to search for mp3 artefacts (well done, I suppose) but maybe I can reassure some who seem to be on the fence on this topic: Do not dwell. This is a great way to waste time and money and get absolutely nothing of value in return. Aim for headphones you enjoy listening on. They are probably not that expensive. Make sure they have replacement parts available, specially for the ear pieces and cable.

dusted 5y ago

5 out of 6, and the wrong one was 320 kbit, but that one was very close between them.. between wav and 320 mp3, it's difficult enough that I can't put firm words on it.. the wav is "more" or "larger" or "fuller" without there being anything specific I can point at.

asciimov 5y ago
5 out of 6 as well using a cheap pair of Koss KSC75 with some late 30's ears. It was the Katie Perry Song that I missed. "larger and fuller" is a good way to describe it.